July 11, 2013

On the hillside

Moving takes ages doesn't it? I feel like I've spent weeks either packing or unpacking boxes, in between numerous visits to the tip. We are currently between houses, so the packing and unpacking hasn't finished yet, but things have calmed down a little bit.

I realised I hadn't blogged about my finished Oakshott and Liberty quilt. It's packed away in storage at the moment, but I did take some photos of it that I can share. I am absolutely thrilled in how it turned out - which is a good job as it took bloody ages!

Oakshotts seem very hard to photograph - they seem to come out either too muted or too bright. In reality they have a wonderful depth to them - the colours shift as you move the fabric.

I quilted the centre with concentric circles, and then the borders with straight lines.

The circles took F O R E V E R. Especially as I managed to pucker up the back and had to unpick 5 hours worth of quilting. That wasn't a happy day.

It's backed and bound with some Denyse Schmidt fabrics that I picked up for a song in the Sale section on the Fat Quarter Shop website. The borders are a Moda Crossweave in Natural and some black and white spotted fabric that I had lying around.

I used a selection of 9 colours from a Sunrise Fat 8ths pack of Oakshott, but I had 2 packs - so that probably comes to about a fat quarter of each of the colours. The Liberty was a mix of various 5 in squares I had bought from a number of suppliers.

For the batting I used Quilters Dream Cotton for the first time. None of my local shops sell 100% cotton batting, so in the past I've used the prepacked Hobbs stuff, but I far prefer Quilters Dream now. I ordered the Request weight by mistake, which was a bit lighter than I would have chosen, but I decided to stick with it and it actually worked well for this quilt. I'm keen to try out the Select weight on my next quilt.

All in all I'm very happy with this one. I'm looking forward to getting it unpacked and out on the sofa in our new house!